The present invention relates to a small-scale piezo- or smart-material-actuator that can produce usable mechanical motion from electrical energy and can also serve to harvest electrical energy from mechanical motion or provide a voltage relative to force acted upon the device. Actuators of this type are known in the art. However, such devices are relatively large and are not well-suited to applications requiring very small components. In part, the difficulties in making very small actuators of this type derive from the desirability of applying a predetermined compressive force, or “pre-load,” on the smart-material and the difficulty of making sufficiently small mechanical devices capable of creating such a pre-load. Further difficulties arise from the efficiency of multilayer co-fired piezo stacks that required larger stacks to generate a given level of actuator motion. The present invention corrects these shortcomings by providing more efficient actuators based on piezo- or smart-materials that may be manufactured in extremely small sizes.